Legends of Tomorrow: Inside scary alt-reality Doomworld

The Legion of Doom is about rewrite reality on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, creating an alternate and villainous version of the world, aptly called Doomworld.

Over the course of the season, the Legion — which includes Eobard Thawne (Matt Letscher), Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman), Damien Darhk (Neal McDonough), Leonard Snart (Wentworth Miller), and now Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell), who betrayed the Legends in the antepenultimate hour — gathered the pieces of the Spear of Destiny, a weapon that can literally rewrite reality, thus allowing them to maniacally create their own version of the perfect world. Of course, their heaven is basically everyone else’s hell.

“It’s funny, back when we planned out the season and the idea of a dystopian world ruled by a narcissist who is completely without morality, it felt a lot more far-fetched than it became,” executive producer Marc Guggenheim tells EW with a laugh. “Truth be told, it really turned out to be more reflective of current times than we expected. But it’s pretty different.”

The Legends team drew inspiration from Back to the Future Part II, where Marty gets stuck in a hellish future in which Biff basically owns Hill Valley. “The fun of it is not so much the changes to the world, but the changes to the characters that inhabit it,” Guggenheim says. “It’s this idea that instead of just wiping the Legends from existence, the Legion has devised these personal punishments in the form of their new realities.”

For Sara (Caity Lotz) and Amaya (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), that means working as henchmen for Damien Darhk. “We wear these really fun black outfits that I hope to see some people cosplaying, and get to say some funny lines, but it’s a bad reality; it’s not somewhere we’d want to stay,” Lotz says. Ray (Brandon Routh), meanwhile, is a janitor at S.T.A.R. Labs, where Stein (Victor Garber) works under his cruel boss Jax (Franz Drameh). “He just lives to torment and make Stein’s life a living hell,” Drameh teases. “He’s a really nasty piece of work.” Oh, and Nate (Nick Zano) is a conspiracy theorist. Seriously. “Nate has a really bad haircut,” Lotz says. “He looks like Zack Morris.”

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While the Legion is in charge here, ultimately the real overlord within Doomworld is the Reverse-Flash, who came up with the plan to obtain the Spear of Destiny in the first place — though he has other goals in mind. “The primary objective is to release himself from the Black Flash,” Letscher says. “Once the Black Flash is erased from existence, then he can focus on his original mission with Barry (Grant Gustin). I don’t know how or when that might play out at any time, so I can’t enlighten you in any way, but everything that’s been holding him up all season long is gone in the blink of an eye and it’s working out exactly how he hoped it might.”

Naturally, not everyone within the Legion will be happy that Reverse-Flash has the ultimate power here. “There’s a loose alliance,” Letscher says. “Fiefdoms is a good way to put it, but the person in charge, the ultimate governor of it all is Thawne, and Darhk and Merlyn are subservient to him for a number of reasons. Having ultimate control, really he is — to borrow an overused phrase — the master of his domain at this point. He calls all the shots. He has literally written people’s roles for them in this reality and the next step might be that he rewrites reality so that he is The Flash or something like that. The sky’s the limit. But for now, having total control over everyone, including the rest of the Legion of Doom and the Legends, is just a dream come true.”

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But the Legends won’t go down without a fight. “Thawne definitely kept us around to poke fun and just to have us be his little toys and demean us,” Routh adds, teasing that despite Ray being a janitor in this reality, he may find a way to help the Legends gain back their memories. “None of us have our abilities and powers. It’s a bit of the worst nightmare.”

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Describing this as a “completely different episode than we’ve ever seen before,” Richardson-Sellers laments the Legends’ plight: “How can they possibly escape an alternate reality?” The team’s only hope in that regard is Mick, who starts to have doubts about the deal he’s made with the Legion. “It’s an opportunity for him to really prove himself, to make that choice, whether it’s through his team and this new way of life or this old version of who he was with Snart,” Routh says.

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Suffice it to say, the team will have to go to great lengths in order to ultimately take down the Legion. “There’s a real chance that they’ll be stuck in this alternate reality,” Drameh says. Adds Zano: “We come up with a plan that is something we were always told never to do in time travel. There’s one ginormous red button we are not supposed to deal with in time travel and that’s the only way that this is going to work.”